If You Can Read This, Then Perhaps We Can Work Together

In my efforts to further develop their economy, I proposed to the elders a system by which rack space in the village’s grape drying house could be bought and sold among the residents. By doing it this way, various permutations would stabilize the economy. For example, if someone suffered a crop loss, then at least he could rent out his unneeded rack space to his more fortunate neighbors and get a little income. The elders saw merit in this idea, but there was one insurmountable problem to it, and that problem stopped us dead.

Centuries ago, when Europe started sending big three-mast ships across the world’s oceans, ship owners stood to earn massive profits, but they did so at enormous risk. Every time a ship went out, it might never return again, and the loss of one ship could ruin a man. You might expect that they would give up on ocean voyages all together as being to risky. But, no; overall, successful voyages brought in enough wealth to cover the occasional losses, when the ocean-going enterprise was taken as a whole. Had one man owned all of Europe’s fleets, it would have been a beautiful business, but no one man was ever that wealthy; for the individual shipowner, this business was nightmarish. Fortunately, there was one quite elegant solution.

An Afghan grape drying house is a tall building of mud brick; the walls are about two feet thick, and the oversized bricks are deliberately placed to leave large air gaps between them. The inside is a single cavernous space. Bunches of grapes are hung from stout wooden poles stuck in the walls. The thick walls, easy air flow, and evaporation from the grapes drops the temperature by maybe twenty degrees, compared to the outside air. It is by this process that raisins are made. It is common to have one such house for use by the whole village; these things are big and expensive, and so communal ownership is the way to go.

Communal ownership is what they have; shared ownership is what I was hoping to introduce. Shared ownership is what you do when a thing is simply too expensive for one person to own outright. European shipping took the idea and developed the next step: shared risk. Shared risk is what you do when success is assured for the group of owners taken as a whole, but the attendant dangers are too great for any one individual to bear. The special name we have for this is “insurance,” and insurance was first invented for the maritime shipping industry.

In order to work, shared ownership and shared risk both require one thing, and it is something that Europeans had but rural Afghans did not: literacy. Written records are needed in order to keep track of who owns what, and it was the inability to do this that compelled the elders to nix my idea of grape house space ownership. The told me that knowing which families owned which rack space was simply too complex of a job. Had literacy not been widespread in Europe, their merchant marines would never have sailed.